He looked into her clever, charming face, understanding perfectly what she was at, and yet the finesse did not irritate him as it would have done in another woman. Besides, in this instance, she was just a little too clever, as he meant to prove to her.
"By all means," he replied coolly; "I was just going there myself to apologise to Mrs. Cameron for my sister's negligence, but really the weather has been so bad."
Mrs. Vane shot an amused glance at her tall companion. So Paul meant to ride the high horse, that poorest of all defences against a quick wit; like that of lance against bayonet, dignified and circumambient, but quite ineffectual.
"But I am not going to see Mrs. Cameron," she retorted frankly; "I am going to see if Miss Carmichael will be kind and play Bach to me; it is a long time since I heard him played so well. You used to be fond of him, too, in the old days, Paul. Don't you remember how you used to lie on the sofa after that fever and declare that a wife's first duty was to be able to play to her husband? But girls--at least, most girls--don't care to play nowadays unless they are professionals. And if they are professionals they don't care to be wives--not even to a Highland laird."
"In regard to the present musician," replied Paul, beginning to dismount, "I am sure no such scheme of self-sacrifice ever entered her head. Miss Carmichael is charming, I admit; but she has a mission in life, and it is not to regulate me. That, I think, is a fair and full statement of the truth, except that before I came here she used to practise occasionally on the piano at the Big House, and, I presume, left her music there by mistake."
Mrs. Vane stopped in an attitude of tragic despair. "There! I have gone and forgotten it after all, and that was my excuse for going so soon. You see, your sister said it had better be taken back at once, as none of the girls in the house played, and so it wouldn't be wanted."
Paul bit his lip at the double thrust. "Perhaps it is as well you have forgotten it," he said angrily; "Miss Carmichael will, no doubt, be able to use it herself some day soon."
"That will be delightful," replied Mrs. Vane, with a sudden cessation of attack.
Five minutes after, rather to his own surprise, Paul Macleod found himself talking to Marjory as he might have talked to any other girl of his acquaintance, and wondering how he could have been such a fool as to imagine himself to be in love with her. After all, he told himself, his first theory had been right, and the ridiculously unconventional familiarity of the past idyll was mainly responsible for the mawkish sentimentality which had attacked him of late, but which, thank heaven! was now over. How could it be otherwise with a girl like Marjory--a perfect iceberg of primness and propriety?
His sense of security, joined to a certain unconfessed resentment at her apparent indifference as to whether he came or not, drove him into more effusive apologies on his sister's behalf than he would otherwise have made, and brought down on him a remark from Mrs. Cameron that "Indeed and in truth Marjory would no be going to make strangers of the laird and his sister, and he so kind, in and out o' the house for weeks, just like a bairn of her own." Whereat Mrs. Vane, stifling a desire to laugh at Paul's evident confusion, came to the rescue with a well-timed diversion about some of the household troubles which had been occupying Lady George.